Saturday, February 23, 2013

Originally a 1963 hit for The Drifters, On Broadway was covered probably more than twenty times, but only got real extensive airplay after Benson's 1978 version (album 'Weekend in LA'). Benson, a Pittsburgh, PA native, has been making music and touring continually since 1963 - and I'm not even counting his 1954 stint as Little George Benson. I wonder what Rihanna or Beyonce will be doing in 2063?

Goo Goo Dolls with Iris.

GGD formed in 1986 in Buffalo, NY. Seems to me they only came to prominence with this hit, drawn from the soundtrack of the 1998 pooper City of Angels (with Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage).

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Yet another gem by that most illustrious gentleman and chronicler of the West's woes; Takuan Seiyo. The tenth installment in the 'The Bee and the Lamb series'. From our pals at Gates of Vienna:

"...Postmodern (“PoMo”) ideology explicitly rejects truth and logic. In such a framework, it’s easier to understand the curious mixture of presentism and relativism we visited earlier. Hicks summarizes this perverse phenomenon as: “On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.” He adduces enduring examples of postmodernist theory blatantly at odds with historical facts:Postmodernists: The West is deeply racist.Fact: The West ended slavery for the first time ever, and racist ideas are on the defensive only in places where Western ideas have made inroads. Postmodernists: The West is deeply sexist.Fact: Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without.Postmodernists: Western capitalist countries are cruel and exploitive of their poorer citizens.Fact: The poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.The place of honor in the postmodernist Pantheon belongs probably to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derrida’s main task in life was to help advance Marxism by deconstruction of the rational foundations of the West. An academic superstar, the list of universities where he coughed the infecting mist into the brains of adoring tens of thousands included, among others, France’s three most prestigious universities: Sorbonne, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Johns Hopkins, Yale, New York University, The New School for Social Research, Stony Brook University and the University of California at Irvine.

Jacques Derrida, who made a career of poisoning the minds of generations of western students. A traitor in the mould of Jean-Paul Sartre.

The Australian mathematician and architectural critic Nikos Salingaros summed up Derrida’s “contribution” to Western Civilization as a lethal virus absolutizing subjectivity, motivated by the will to destroy [3]:“Deconstruction asserts that texts have no ultimate meaning, and that their interpretation is up to readers. Deconstruction [snip] erases associations that form coherent thoughts. It acts like a computer virus that erases information in a hard disk. The Derrida virus seeks to undermine any original meaning via a complex and entirely self-referential play of words.Deconstruction devalues common sense and rejects customary wisdom. [snip] As a virus, it has invaded civilization, erasing collective common sense while spreading with astonishing rapidity.Deconstruction is not simply a worldview among others. A method to erase knowledge, masquerading as a new philosophical movement, cannot be quarantined within academia. Indoctrinated students eventually enter the real world threatening to create havoc. [snip] Deconstruction has been remarkably successful in dismantling traditional literature, art, and architecture. Like a biological virus [snip], it only partially destroys its host, because total destruction would stop further transmission. It breaks up coherent sets of ideas by separating natural modules into submodules. Some of these submodules are then selectively destroyed in order to subsequently reattach their components randomly into an incoherent construct.[snip] Once formed, worldviews are unlikely to change and are trusted more than any direct sensory evidence. These internal worldviews become so much a part of oneself that they are unlikely to undergo any modification, unless one is forced to do so. For this reason, those who have adopted a cult philosophy deny all evidence that threatens the cult’s vision of reality. Rational arguments make no difference.”

Salingaros quotes Derrida himself: “All I have done … is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things … The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. [snip] This is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding … is neither alive nor dead … [this is] all that I have done since I began writing.” [4]If Derrida infected the culture with an intellectual virus, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) carried this one step further by sparing no efforts to infect himself, eventually dying of AIDS after a promiscuous sweep of the homo bathhouses of San Francisco.

Yet another one who chose to defecate on the accomplishments of our illustrious western civilization even though he enjoyed the multitude of opportunities life in its sphere offered. How on earth is it possible that monsters like Foucault had such a tremendous appeal on our gullible students?

A graduate of the two aforementioned citadels of French learning, Foucault is acknowledge as perhaps the preeminent social theorist and historian of ideas of mid-20th century, though he was, to be blunt, simply a malevolent intellectual masturbator in the solipsistic German tradition (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger). A prolific one, though, with a recondite vocabulary and soporifically impenetrable style, which, along with his membership in the French Communist Party, later supplanted by Maoist idolatry, qualified him for admission to France’s most august intellectual body, Collège de France, as — this bears reflection — Professor of the History of Systems of Thought.Like Derrida, Foucault spread his intellectual HIV over much of the world in person. In addition to his teaching positions in several French universities, he held academic posts in Sweden, Germany, Poland, Tunisia and, in the United States, at the University of Buffalo and at UC Berkeley. We will not waste time perusing his books, though various dystopian afflictions plaguing the West now are the result of eager university students absorbing their postmodernist teaching and then inflicting it upon their lessers after assuming responsible positions in society. Among others, we owe the pervasive odor of urine and the pitiful shrieking hobos in our center cities, and not a few small genocides by obvious madmen left to live among the sane, to Foucault’s 1961 book, Madness and Civilization and its critique of domineering Reason suppressing the truth of madness. Those who wonder how Europe could have possibly committed the prima facie insanity of importing millions of sharia pollinators might peruse Foucault’s panegyrics to the new form of “political spirituality” he perceived in Muslim turmoil during the 1979 Iranian mullahs’ revolution [5].How vast and demented Foucault’s influence has been might be inferred from a peek into Journal of Research in Nursing that, one might assume, exists in order to publish learned articles about the swabbing of wounds and intravenous nutrition. The abstract of “On the constitution and status of ‘evidence’ in the health sciences” reads: “Drawing on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, this paper interrogates the constitution of ‘evidence’ that defines the evidence-based movement in the health sciences. What are the current social and political conditions under which scientific knowledge appears to be ‘true’? Foucault describes these conditions as state ‘science’, a regime that privileges economic modes of governance and efficiency. Today, the Cochrane taxonomy and research database is increasingly endorsed by government and public health policy makers. Although this ‘evidence-based’ paradigm ostensibly promotes the noble ideal of ‘true knowledge’ free from political bias, in reality, this apparent neutrality is dangerous because it masks the methods by which power silently operates to inscribe rigid norms and to ensure political dominance. Through the practice of critique, this paper begins to expose and to politicise the workings of this power, ultimately suggesting that scholars are in a privileged position to oppose such regimes and foremost have the duty to politicize what hides behind the distortion and misrepresentation of ‘evidence’.” [6]

Professor Hicks summarizes Foucault in these words:“In his ‘Introduction’ to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault [snip] speaks of his desire to erase himself. [snip] Foucault extends his desire for effacement to the entire human species. At the end of The Order of Things, for example, he speaks almost longingly about the coming erasure of mankind: Man is ‘an invention of recent date that will soon be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’”What civilization, then, could possibly enshrine a death-craving, babble-spouting sodomite nymphomaniac, but one that has been similarly infected? Except it’s not the civilization that has been infected but just its official custodians and their acolytes whom another Frenchman, Julien Benda, accused of treason already in 1927. The simpler folks had just been seduced to turn away. They inhaled in increasing doses and came to like a compound of dumb digital diversions, sex, porn and pop, uppers and downers, slavery to credit and status shopping, and news and entertainment programs programmed by programmers with hidden agendas and degrees conferred by the same loci of treason and insanity as had enshrined Messrs. Derrida and Foucault. And Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) too, the guru of the 60’s and the most influential peddler of the Frankfurt School’s tainted goods in the United States.

Perhaps the most prominent 'intellectual' traitor of the West, Herbert Marcuse.

The Institut für Sozialforschung had been established at the University of Frankfurt in 1923 by an endowment from German expat Felix Weil and his father, a prominent grain merchant in Argentina. It was a particularly German concoction, heavily influenced by Hegel and Heidegger, and imbued with the notion that Western Civilization, having mortally injured itself in Word War I, was fit for the trash heap and had to be replaced. Mutating a new form of Marxism, the Frankfurt School taught that power lay with the institutions of culture, rather than with those who controlled the means of production. Thus was “Critical Theory” born, by which all Western cultural precepts and institutions could be taken down one by one, so that Revolution might finally succeed.The raison d’être for this work being to plow through where there is too much beating around the bush, let us redefine “German” as “German-Jewish.” Practically all the big names of the Frankfurt School were Jews: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal, Kurt Lewin, Adolph Lowe, Erich Fromm, David Riazanov (Russian) [7]. The gentiles were a small and less distinguished minority: Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, the fabled Soviet spy Richard Sorge. Why would the wealthiest (and Jewish [8]) grain merchant in the world want to fund a Marxist institute is as much an enigma as why the wealthy (and non-Jewish) industrialist Friedrich Engels would finance Karl Marx or why hundreds of the wealthiest Americans, many from old American families and, again, with a disproportionate Jewish participation, would actively, passionately, devote so much energy and money toward the destruction of their own country and their own ethny. The American evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald who reconstructed the previously semi-taboo Jewish components of major Leftist calamities like the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, and the Frankfurt School, has built a theory around that. Alas, the theory he laid out in his The Culture of Critique trilogy and other writings is little more than a medieval blood libel: the Joos have a genetic evolutionary strategy to dominate and feed off their “white” host [9].A credible theory, instead of sieving out all the contradictory data and making unwarranted generalizations based on the hand-picked remainder, would account for and integrate the counter-indicators; for instance, that the Jews were among the most patriotic segments of the German population: from a community of under 600,000, an estimated 90,000 Jews served in the German Army during World War 1 and 12,000 lost their lives. Likewise, whereas the most consequential proponents of Marxism in all its forms have been Jews, the most consequential proponents of libertarian freedom were also Jews: the important ones include Mises, Hayek (1/4 Jewish), Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedman...."

Too bad a literary genius like Takuan Seiyo has but a infinitesimal fraction of the appeal and readership that scoundrels like Derrida, Foucault and Marcuse had - and have. What a tragedy, in fact.